Petra Cortright
with
José de Arrelano
Jan Van Os
Gaspar Pieter Verbruggen II
The Master of the Budapest Antiphoner
The Annunciation to the Virgin, from a Book of Hours
A leaf from the Elmhirst-Courtanvaux Hours
27 September – 20 December 2025
Private View: Saturday 27 September, 12-6pm
RSVP info@interval-clerkenwell.art
“Jeannotte is an American impresario, a one-time singer. I made his acquaintance around 1908 or 1909 in Montreal. He told me he was related on his mother’s side to the family of Oscar Wilde. Jeannotte was very young when he met the poet at the house of an English duchess. It was in summer at a castle, teatime in a large company. The duchess took from a vase a magnificent rose in perfect bloom. She inhaled its scent, had it passed round, and everybody went into raptures, for its scent matched its beauty. It came to Oscar Wilde; the sun was bursting in through the open window; the poet sniffed the flower ardently, but in a flash tore off the petals and threw them out of the window. A tremor of indignation rose against the sacrilege. Turning on the opposition, Oscar Wilde said to them: ‘It would have been too sad to see such a rose wither.’ Their feelings were soothed.” René Gimpel, from the French art dealer’s diary. 31 March 1918
Interval is a new gallery project space, in the heart of Clerkenwell, London, launching with its inaugural exhibition “NOBLEcurve” by LA-based artist Petra Cortright, featuring 12 new floral digital paintings on aluminium and a new video artwork, alongside several rare old master and medieval artworks. Interval is founded and curated by father and son, David and Jacob Gryn, dedicated to bringing leading contemporary artists work together with historic artworks, exploring aesthetic dialogues, ideas and connections between the works and their eras.
Cortright’s rich and beautifully formed artworks are created in response to the consigned works for the show from Interval’s old master gallery collaborators Rafael Valls and Sam Fogg, featuring 17th and 18th century Dutch and Spanish floral still life paintings by Gaspar Pieter Verbruggen II, Jan Van Os, José de Arrelano, alongside the 15th century manuscript pages: A kneeling patron before the Virgin and Child, from the Elmhirst-Courtanvaux Hours, The Annunciation to the Virgin from a Book of Hours and a leaf by The Master of the Budapest Antiphoner.
Petra Cortright (b.1986, Santa Barbara, California) is a Los Angeles based artist whose practice spans digital painting, video and online culture. Over the last 15 years Petra has been working in the format of digital painting. A unique process comprised of working with reference imagery that is then scanned and expanded pixel by pixel, mixed with brush strokes and other source imagery to create paintings with hundreds of layers. Cortright then works closely with a master printer in Brooklyn to layer these onto her various materials (aluminium, canvas, wood, etc). Petra is one of the most highly recognised digital and video artists of her generation. Her work has been exhibited internationally at many leading institutions including: MoMA, LACMA, Hammer Museum, MOCA Chicago, New Museum, Stedelijk Museum, Kölnischer Kunstverein and Walker Art Center. It has featured in the Venice Biennale, Art Basel and Frieze London. She has had notable solo exhibitions with Team Gallery (New York), Société (Berlin), Carl Kostyál (London and Stockholm), Ever Gold [Projects] (San Francisco), Foxy Production (New York) and Daata, both online and with The Bass Museum (Miami) and Jodhpur Art Week (India)
Recently at Art Basel Unlimited 2025, Petra Cortright’s installation ‘sapphire cinnamon viper fairy’ takes the form of over two hundred webcam videos spanning sixty-nine monitors. Each video, a tiny, self-contained world, converges into a larger, ever-evolving collage. Conceived between 2007 and 2023, during the rise of smartphones and selfie culture, when the internet was, in her words, “a big empty space,” Cortright’s webcam works reflect an organic form of online existence: one driven by curiosity and the desire to simply be seen, even if just for a fleeting moment.
David Gryn has been a leading curator with contemporary moving image, film, sound, video, digital media, the founder of Artprojx, Daata and curator for Art Basel in Miami Beach. Jacob Gryn is a curator and musician, working with leading contemporary artists and musicians worldwide.
“In considering who to launch Interval with, and working in line with our mission to connect contemporary artists with historic artworks in the project space, Petra Cortright was a perfect choice. We had both relished collaborating with Petra on her beautiful digital art commissions for Daata and The Bass Museum back in 2018 — with my curation, and Jacob creating the sound for her videos. Interestingly, those video artworks also sourced historic floral paintings. Our next goal was to find the most fitting historic artworks to present alongside Petra’s work, and happily, Rafael Valls and Sam Fogg were delighted to work with us! And here we are now…” David Gryn 2025
